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26 meditate on the causes and results of action. Indeed these cannot be altogether hidden from the persons on the stage. It is in moments of struggle and difficulty that moral reflection becomes most active, and moral principles acquire supreme importance. And that can hardly be a satisfying work of art, or fitted to command wide interest, which represents persons who are to seem worthy of sympathy as at such moments totally indifferent to morality. Still less can the poet or the spectator be carried out of the sphere of right. For tragedy is at once individual and universal: individual, because the persons act from motives resulting from their characters and situations, and believed as real: universal, because their lives are regarded as typifying the whole of human destiny.

Tragedy is sure to reflect the deepest morality of the age in which it lives. And this, in regard to ethical reflection, is most likely to be an age of growth or transition. A rude or frivolous period can have no tragedy; a "reasoned" philosophy of life, perhaps, would leave no room for it. It seems to flourish most when the collective interest in life is greatest, and reflection at the same time most ardent, but not yet mature. The inexhaustible moral wisdom that combined with the art of Shakespeare in creating Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, and Othello, affords the more astonishing proof of what has been said, because these plays were produced, not for solemn exhibition at an annual religious festival, but simply to please an audience who came night after night to "see away their shilling."

It is possible to hold this truth, and yet to affirm the distinction between two kinds of tragic artist, one possessed, like Æschylus, with the consciousness of a moral and religious mission, and inspired with principles which directly inform his work; the other before all else an artist, who, notwithstanding, conveys deep lessons; because, without doing so, he must come short of the legitimate effect of his art.

II. The ethical ideas of the age which